Talk about complete! The author wasn't kidding when he titled it "The Complete Block Book". This book is an interesting look at the use and popularity of blocks over the past 200 years. You will learn everything you ever wanted to know about blocks including their use in educational settings, the different types of blocks available, the benefits to children, why blocks are considered educational toys, how best to set up a block corner, and which educators and philosophers influenced the popularity of blocks. Also, this book gives a very good historical overview of the emergence of "play as work" as a concept in children's education.

I read this book for a teaching class I am taking in college and it's great. Dr. Provenzo offers a concise history of the Internet and WWW. He stresses the importance of computer technology in the Century to come. He also offers many addresses to interesting sites that a teacher may use in his/her class. He gives detailed examples of lesson plans that can be created through the use of the Internet. Essential for the Computer-weary.

This is a critique of video games, written by a person who has never played one. His research seems to extend as far as watching others play, scanning advertising materials and frequenting the game stores with a notebook in hand.

The author gets the names of games wrong (_The Adventure of Zelda?_), and a section accusing the game _Dragon Warrior_ of sexism is especially embarrassing. He complains that the back of the game box does not name the Princess that you have to rescue. If he had bothered to OPEN the box, then he would have found her name displayed very prominently in the instructions.

He does not even stop to consider the fact that most (all?) of the games mentioned in his book come from Japan, a country with a different set of cultural assumptions than his.

This book is _very_ poorly researched.

This book looks at video game as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, which means raising the kind of questions like whether excessive playing of the video game will promote and encourage violence and aggression. This seems true but there are people actually counter-argue that playing the game will purge the desire of the players to act aggressively, thus consequently reducing the aggression of the players. Another typical question brought up in the book is about the underlying messages carried by the video game, such as the gender stereotype. The girls in the games are often portrayed as ¡§weak¡¨ and submissive victims being kidnapped; while the boys are always the one to rescue and save the girls. Though the author has put much effort on analyzing the contents of many popular Nintendo games and fitting the findings into this framework or perspective, many of the arguments put forward in the book are simply similar to other scholarly books that look at the computer from a cultural viewpoint. For example, the book "The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-neutrality of Technology" by C.A. Bowers is much more widely known, and is about the kind of messages amplified by the computer. If you are familiar with this kind of works, you may not gain much insight from this book. But if you find the above examples or arguments interesting, you may have a look.

Although the current industy has a wider audience than when this book was written, it does an interesting job of asking how do video games affect our culture. It reads like a psychology thesis paper... I don't nescesarily mean that in abad way. It relates many surveys and studies about games and whether they induce violence, sexism, etc. in kids. If you have any interest in these issues it can offer some solid information and teach a little about the study of sociology it is worth some time.